Col Allan, the editor of the New York Post whose career will likely be ended by the cartoon equating President Obama with a chimpanzee, has worked for Rupert Murdoch for 34 years. He is among the people at Murdoch’s News Corp. who are closest to the boss. He was promoted to his job at the Post from the editorship of the Daily Telegraph, Murdoch’s paper in Sydney, by Murdoch’s son Lachlan. The Murdochs are wealthy, educated and, in their way, genteel aristocrats. Allan is a hard-drinking, profane, sometimes violent newspaper hack without education or polish—and, yet, he’s as close as you get to a Murdoch family alter-ego.
When Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal little more than a year ago, one of the first things he did was take Col Allan to meet the editors there—that was Murdoch’s way of screwing with the fancy heads of the Journal staff, making it clear that Allan was his kind of editor and journalist.
The fact that Allan is now being hung out to dry, and his obituary written, over a cartoon, is more mind blowing to Allan than to anyone else. After all, the Post has always been all things a tabloid should be—what Murdoch wanted it to be. In your face, politically incorrect, gleeful in its disregard of journalistic propriety. If you took issue with that, well, the Post would rough you up a bit. The aggressive, reckless, racially insensitive nature of the chimp cartoon is just business as usual at the Post.
(AP Image)
But this time it’s different. The Post, always protected by its owner’s love and money and its own get-even ethic, is suddenly up against it, pilloried everywhere. This time someone’s going to pay for
its meanness.
This is not just because the Post’s offense is so tone deaf—though racial hostility is a note best not played ineptly. Nor because the Obama election has so profoundly changed the game. But as much
because the Post itself, once the apple of Murdoch’s eye, is now in a much downgraded position. For one thing Murdoch has the Wall Street Journal—that’s his paper of record. The Post’s tabloid owner is now a respectable broadsheet man. For another thing, the Post’s annual losses of $60-$80 million look a lot different in a recession (it’s a not-so-secret secret that Murdoch has been trying to figure out a way to lessen the losses, if not dump the Post altogether). And, most of all, because the Post is a newspaper—if it once was invulnerable, now, like every newspaper, it’s imperiled.
They’re afraid at the Post, as everyone who works for any newspaper anywhere is. Everybody there is suddenly cringing—at Allan’s tastelessness, but also at the bleak future for newspaper people. The Post’s bravado, its pride, its breeziness (nobody much cared when Page Six got caught taking bribes, or when it tried to shake down sources) is, in this instance, nowhere apparent.
Everybody’s waiting for the shoe to drop.
They hope it will drop first on Col Allan.
More of Newser founder Michael Wolff's articles and commentary can be found at VanityFair.com, where he writes a regular column. He can be emailed at michael@newser.com
